Stephen Thompson

And so anytime she turns up in anything, I'm like, oh boy.

So I don't necessarily, I'm not sure I'm capable of thinking she's miscast.

It does spend a fair bit of time kind of hinting at more of a backstory for the Renata Reins of a character than it really pays off.

I kind of expected a little bit more ends to get tied together or a little bit more to be explained.

It kind of hints that she has a traumatic childhood that may be informing her perception of what's going on.

And I don't know that that fully coheres, but I'm also not sure that full coherence is the point of a film like this.

These kids today with their creepypastas.

I mean, I think that's a really, really, really excellent and important point.

And it's something that I've certainly thought about.

I've watched a lot of like teen coming of age movies that are supposed to be set in the present day, but are clearly through a Gen X lens.

Yeah.

The number of coming-of-age stories that are like kids on bikes in a small town, that's very much my experience growing up.

I grew up in a small town.

I was a kid on a bike.

But the experience of how the internet and how YouTube and how

the nature of kind of internet folklore that you can get steeped in.

All of these things were completely alien to my childhood.

And to see how that is going to affect art going forward, we talk all the time about how negative it can be and how terrifying things like AI are to any kind of creative enterprise.

But this film hints at a way that it could be deployed in

in extremely thoughtful and intriguing ways.